The Sims 4 has a serious age gap problem with current lifestages

I agree that the lifestages are a bit off. I think of the baby and infant stage as 1 year, toddler up to 5 years old, child age 6-12 and teen 13-19. Young adult would be 20-30. That would mean that the child is the same (6 years) as the teen, so when they increased the teen's life stage, it made it more unrealistic for me. Think they did it so they can be played longer with high school. Same with infants compared to toddlers. I usually set up my own life spans, leaving aging off, for this reason. I am going to try playing on long with my new game in Chestnut Ridge to see how it goes, but I may plan to age up teens (and infant too) with a cake if I find it annoys me. The infants are only 1 week less than toddlers, and toddlers should have a longer life stage (4-5 years going by toddler clothing sizes). They need the extra time for the new milestones, so I understand why they did it. I would love adjustable life stages so we can be in control of how we want to play each stage. Some simmers may want a longer or shorter life stage for different age groups, depending on how they play and which stage they want to play the longest. Hopefully it is something they will do in the future. We do have some control with aging on/off but actually being able to adjust the stages would be awesome!

I agree that there is an age gap, and for me it has less to do with YA-teen issue (I mean teen mums do exist), but more to do with the elderly mother scenario. I play with neighborhood stories on, but that also means dealing with a lot of elderly sims that are suddenly parents to infants. Basically as long as a sim is marked for pregnancy before they're an elder, there is nothing stopping them from having new kids even after they've aged up, which means toddlers and children without parents when they die. Same with adult parents calling their YA/teen kids and asking if they should have a new kid. "No, you're seventy next week, stop asking!"

We have 6 life stages for the first 30 years of a persons life, then only 2 for the remaining 50 or 60. One more would not be unreasonable. I really loved the addition of midlife crises for adults, but still. It would be nice with something in between. Most of all a stage where adults look a bit older, have wrinkles (but not so much as an elder), the midlife crises from GrT, and stop being able to have kids (or sims that can make others pregnant can keep going, but with less fertility, but sims that give birth should not be able to do this for a midlife stage).

Pre-teen and mid adults are a need for TS4!!!!